By coincidence, one of my students asked me just today if students could
have access to Turnitin. I explained that I don't give my students
access to it because it encourages the idea that student essays are
normally derivative, and that the academic game is to hide the extent of
the derivativeness. If students have access to Turnitin, they can tweak
their wording until the matches disappear. But this doesn't address the
problem that too many students are regurgitating material they have been
given rather than thinking for themselves. Assignments should be set in
such a way that students can't pass unless they demonstrate their own
independent thinking. This is what I do, and the only reason why I use
Turnitin is not to catch cheats, because my students don't cheat, but to
provide objective evidence that my students don't cheat.
I might add that the student concerned confessed that on another module
he had decided to make his essay a re-write of the lecture hand-outs,
because he reckoned he would get higher marks than for the product of
his own thinking. Oh dear! And this is a philosophy student!
George.
-----Original Message-----
From: Plagiarism [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sandy
Steacy
Sent: 01 February 2007 19:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Student access to Turnitin
The use of Turnitin across UU is still relatively new although it's been
used fairly extensively in a few schools over the past couple of years.
Mine is one of these and to date our recommended default is not to allow
students access to their reports, primarily due to concerns that they
could "learn to beat the system".
However, this year we suggested that students should be allowed to
access their reports for, and only for, their first piece of submitted
work, a short essay as part of a small group tutorial. This seems to me
to be a reasonable compromise but we've not yet followed up on the
problems/benefits in any detail.
Sandy Steacy
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